Assisting Blind People to Interact with Public Displays

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25330241
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Human interface and interaction
• Research Institution: Kochi University of Technology
• Principal Investigator: KIM kibum 高知工科大学, 総合研究所, 客員研究員 (20646963)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): REN xiangshi 高知工科大学, 工学部, 教授 (00287442)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: HCI / CSCW / Assistive Technology / Blind Users / Large Vertical Display / Haptic / Air Gesture / Handheld Device

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The rapid growth of large interactive display systems in our daily lives enables sighted people to walk up and derive great advantages spontaneously and naturally. On the other hand, this technology remains largely inaccessible to people with visual impairments. In an effort to deliver the same benefits to people with visual impairments, we have explored the feasibility of gesture input and vibrotactile feedback to help them access targets on a large wall-mounted display through several experiments. Based on the experiment results, we could publish a couple of papers to international journals.

Our results confirm the potential of our proposed techniques to enhance the ability of people with visual impairments to access information on large interactive vertical displays. It is our aspiration that this initial work will serve as the first step towards granting them equal access to information on large public displays in the near future.

Free Research Field

Human Computer Interaction